Dianna Padilla

Research areas

Research years

I am interested in phenotypic plasticity, especially inducible offenses and defenses in marine invertebrates, as well as introduced species. This summer I will focus on continuing my research on snails in the genus Lacuna, dominant grazers on the Pacific coast of North America, who change their feeding morphlogy (radula) in response to changes in their diet. More recently we have been working on food-web based models to understand the dynamics of these important species and their traits. An important part of the system that is little understood is the role of predators on these snails, in particular their two major invertebrate predators the seastar Lepasterias and the crab Pugettia grascilis. Previous work has shown that Lacuna is a major prey item for the seastar, but with the recent loss of seastars due to wasting disease, the dynamics of predator-prey interactions in this system may shift. We will conduct field studies and laboratory mesocosm studies to examine the densities and feeding rates of each of these predators in the two different habitat types, macroalgal beds and eelgrass beds.